CTO's Role

Camille discusses the diversity of CTO types and asserts that the CTO should be "the strategic technical executive the company needs in its current stage of evolution." She emphasizes the importance for a CTO to understand the business and have management oversight. She covers: • First, let's start by talking about what a CTO is not. • So, what does a CTO actually DO?

Mark defines the CTO role as one that focuses on architecture, while the VP of Engineering role prioritizes people management. He also advocates for a program management function once the company reaches a certain scale.

James provides a map for all the areas that new CTO or VPE needs to dive into and understand, broken down into 4 categories: Company, Product, Humans, and Technical

Karl details the responsibilities of a CTO at a startup: 1. Building the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) 2. Hiring Engineers, IT professionals, and data scientists 3. Figuring out company-wide security 4. Product management 5. Application architecture 6. Bug triage 7. QA and testing 8. DevOps 9. Data science and Machine Learning 10. Vendor and Customer Relationships 11. Overseeing the version 2.0 12. Team growth management 13. Employee Retention

Edward narrates his full journey from technical co-founder to heading up a 100-engineer organization. Between 10 and 50 engineers he gave up hands-on coding, and between 50 and 100 engineers he learned to operate on much longer time horizons.